English Spirituality, volume I: From Earliest Times to 1700, and: English Spirituality, volume II: From 1700 to the Present Day (review)

It may be difficult for those who are unfamiliar with Britain and Ireland to appreciate the obstacles to writing good history of Christianity in these islands. We have only recently emerged from three or four centuries in which the study and writing of Christian history was, with few exceptions, extremely partisan and polemical. At one end of the spectrum was a kind of "Whig" view of Christian history, the crude version of which runs something like this: the Apostolic and Patristic ages of the Church represent "true" Christianity. After that darkness and corruption reigned. Then, in the sixteenth century, God said: "Let the Church of England be" and all was light. At the other extreme Catholics, seeing their community as a persecuted, besieged minority, wrote self-defensive and self-justifying history. The polarization can be seen in the fact that different traditions had different names for the same events. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, for the first time since the days of Elizabeth I, it was legal for the Roman Catholic Church to establish its own dioceses in England and to ordain bishops to them. Those of us who, as children, were educated as Catholics called these events "Catholic emancipation"; it was only later that I discovered that the rest of the country knew them as "Papal aggression".

Writing a history of "spirituality" also presents its own problems. Not least is the issue of definition: what on earth is "Christian spirituality"? In this connection it is worth recalling that "spirituality" can have at least two distinct but related meanings. On one level Christian spirituality means lived belief: the faith, experience and practice, both corporate and individual, of Christians. On a second level, Christian spirituality refers to discourse about Christian life in the Spirit: ways, that is, in which Christian faith and practice have been articulated, expressed, described and reflected upon in different forms of "discourse." As well as words, these forms may include such things as ritual, painting and sculpture, buildings, music and dance. The purpose of writing a history of spirituality, however, as Gordon Mursell points out in his introduction to his first volume, is not to try to "get behind" forms of expression to some kind of putative "pure experience" of spirituality, which in any case does not exist. An experience cannot be separated in this way from the forms in which it is expressed. Since spirituality is rooted in particular social, cultural, political, economic and ecclesial circumstances, we need historians who will explain texts and other artifacts from the past in relation to the beliefs, questions and circumstances of those who created them.

If a historian's task, then, is that of interpretation, to describe, understand, explain, reflect upon and evaluate the relics of past, according to the best interpretative methods and criteria at his or her disposal, then these two volumes by Gordon Mursell represent a very fine achievement. Faced with the number and range of possible historical sources, Mursell has chosen to draw mainly upon written and printed texts, of which there exists a wide range of genres, including autobiography, letters, treatises, sermons, poetry, drama, novels and stories. His work brings together for the first time a broad range of bibliographical sources, both primary and secondary, which have a bearing upon Christian faith, prayer, life and practice in that part of Britain that lies between the Scottish borders and the Welsh marches from Anglo-Saxon times to the end of the twentieth century. For the first time, too, Mursell offers an account, spanning thirteen hundred years, of the ways in which both outstanding and more obscure Christians, those at the...